One of the core competencies of the ENCRYPTO group is building tools that make efficient secure multi-party computation accessible to non-experts. We make our tools available as open source and they are used by several research groups and industry.

Awards and Recognition

• 2022 Best Thesis: Nora Khayata won the price of the Association of Friends of TU Darmstadt “for the best thesis at the chair of Cryptography and Privacy Engineering (ENCRYPTO) 2022” for her master thesis “Flexible File Format and Intermediate Representation for Secure Multi-Party Computation.”
• 2017 CROSSING Collaboration Award: Daniel Demmler and Christian Weinert from the ENCRYPTO Group together with Felix Günther, Stefan Krüger, and Michael Reif won the CROSSING Collaboration Award 2017 for their joint paper “CogniCrypt: Supporting Developers in using Cryptography”.
• 2016 CROSSING Collaboration Award: Daniel Demmler and Michael Zohner from the ENCRYPTO Group together with Ghada Dessouky and Shaza Zeitouni won the CROSSING Collaboration Award 2016 for their joint research on tools for multi-party computation.

Publications (selection)

• D. Günther, J. Schmidt, T. Schneider, and H. Yalame. FLUENT: A Tool for Efficient Mixed-Protocol Semi-Private Function Evaluation. In 40. Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'24), 2024. CORE Rank A.
• L. Braun, M. Huppert, N. Khayata, T. Schneider, and O. Tkachenko. FUSE – flexible file format and intermediate representation for secure multi-party computation (opens in new tab). In 18. ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'23), 2023. CORE rank A.
• L. Braun, D. Demmler, T. Schneider, O. Tkachenko. MOTION – A framework for mixed-protocol multi-party computation. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS), 2022. CORE rank A.
• A. Patra, T. Schneider, A. Suresh, H. Yalame. SynCirc: Efficient synthesis of depth-optimized circuits for secure computation (opens in new tab). In 14. IEEE International Workshop on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST'21), 2021.
• T. Heldmann, T. Schneider, O. Tkachenko, C. Weinert, H. Yalame. LLVM-based circuit compilation for practical secure computation. In 19. International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS'21), 2021. CORE rank B.
• N. Büscher, D. Demmler, S. Katzenbeisser, D. Kretzmer, T. Schneider. HyCC: Compilation of hybrid protocols for practical secure computation. In 25. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'18), 2018. Code: https://gitlab.com/securityengineering/HyCC. CORE rank A*.
• M. S. Riazi, C. Weinert, O. Tkachenko, E. M. Songhori, T. Schneider, F. Koushanfar. Chameleon: A hybrid secure computation framework for machine learning applications. In 13. ACM Asia Conference on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'18), 2018. CORE rank A.
• G. Dessouky, F, Koushanfar, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider, S. Zeitouni, M. Zohner. Pushing the communication barrier in secure computation using lookup tables. In 24. Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'17), 2017. CORE rank A*.
• D. Demmler, G. Dessouky, F. Koushanfar, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider, S. Zeitouni. Automated synthesis of optimized circuits for secure computation. In 22. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'15), 2015. CORE rank A*.
• E. M. Songhori, S. U. Hussain, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider, F. Koushanfar. TinyGarble: Highly compressed and scalable sequential garbled circuits. In 36. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P'15), 2015. CORE rank A*.
• D. Demmler, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. ABY – a framework for efficient mixed-protocol secure two-party computation. In 22. Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'15), 2015. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/ABY. CORE rank A*.
• F. Kerschbaum, T. Schneider, A. Schröpfer. Automatic protocol selection in secure two-party computations. In 12. International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS'14), 2014. CORE rank B.
• W. Henecka, T. Schneider. Faster secure two-party computation with less memory. In 8. ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'13), 2013. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/me-sfe. CORE rank A.
• T. Schneider, M. Zohner. GMW vs. Yao? Efficient secure two-party computation with low depth circuits. In 17. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC'13), 2013. CORE rank A.
• W. Henecka, S. Kögl, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider, I. Wehrenberg. TASTY: Tool for Automating Secure Two-partY computations. In 17. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'10), 2010. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/TASTY. CORE rank A*.

Privacy-preserving machine learning allows to run machine learning algorithms while protecting both the data and the models. This can be achieved by using secure computation techniques.

Awards and Recognition

• 2024 GDD Science Prize for Young Academics: Hossein Yalame won the GDD science prize for Young Academics 2024, awarded by the Society for Data Protection and Data Security (GDD), for his doctoral dissertation “Advancing MPC: From Real-World Applications to LUT-Based Protocols”.
• 2024 Runner-up Distinguished Paper Award: Helen Möllering, Thomas Schneider, and Hossein Yalame of the ENCRYPTO group together with Yaniv Ben-Itzhak, Benny Pinkas, Ajith Suresh, Oleksandr Tkachenko, Shay Vargaftik, and Christian Weinert won the Runner-up Distinguished Paper Award at the 2. IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML'24) for their paper “ScionFL: Secure Quantized Aggregation for Federated Learning”.
• 2021 Private AI Collaborative Research Institute: For our project proposal “Engineering Private AI Systems (EPAI)”, the ENCRYPTO Group was awarded to participate in the Private AI Collaborative Research Institute, which is formed and funded by Intel, Avast, and Borsetta. The center aims at advancing technologies for privacy and trust in decentralized AI.
• 2019 Intel Research Award: The ENCRYPTO group was awarded by Intel Corporation for our research in the area of “Secure and Privacy Preserving AI Frameworks and Run-Times for Data Scientists and Service Providers”.

Publications (selection)

• V. Duddu, A. Das, N. Khayata, H. Yalame, T. Schneider, and N. Asokan. Attesting Distributional Properties of Training Data for Machine Learning. In 29. European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'24), 2024. CORE rank A.
• Q. Pang, J. Zhu, H. Möllering, W. Zheng, and T. Schneider. BOLT: Privacy-Preserving, Accurate and Efficient Inference for Transformers. In 45. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P'24), 2024. CORE rank A*.
• Y. Ben-Itzhak, H. Möllering, B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, A. Suresh, O. Tkachenko, S. Vargaftik, C. Weinert, H. Yalame, and A. Yanai. ScionFL: Secure Quantized Aggregation for Federated Learning. In 2. IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML'24), 2024. Runner-up Distinguished Paper Award.
• T. D. Nguyen, P. Rieger, H. Chen, H. Yalame, H. Möllering, H. Fereidooni, S. Marchal, M. Miettinen, A. Mirhoseini, S. Zeitouni, F. Koushanfar, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. FLAME: Taming backdoors in federated learning. In 31. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'22), 2022. CORE rank A*.
• S. Andreina, G. A. Marson, H. Möllering, G. Karame. BaFFLe: Backdoor detection via feedback-based federated learning (opens in new tab). In 41. IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'21), 2021. CORE rank A.
• B. Bozdemir, S. Canard, O. Ermis, H. Möllering, M. Önen, T. Schneider. Privacy-preserving density-based clustering. In 16. ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'21), 2021. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/ppDBSCAN. CORE rank A.
• T. Schneider. Engineering Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Protocols (opens in new tab). Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning in Practice (PPMLP) – CCS'20 Workshop, Keynote, 2020.
• R. Cammarota, M. Schunter, A. Rajan, F. Boemer, Á. Kiss, A. Treiber, C. Weinert, T. Schneider, E.l Stapf, A.-R. Sadeghi, D. Demmler, H. Chen, S. U. Hussain, S. Riazi, F. Koushanfar, S. Gupta, T. S. Rosing, K. Chaudhuri, H. Nejatollahi, N. Dutt, M. Imani, K. Laine, A. Dubey, A. Aysu, F. S. Hosseini, C. Yang, E. Wallace, P. Norton. Trustworthy AI Inference Systems: An Industry Research View (opens in new tab). Technical Report, 2020.
• F. Boemer, R. Cammarota, D. Demmler, T. Schneider, H. Yalame. MP2ML: A mixed-protocol machine learning framework for private inference. In 15. International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES'20), 2020. CORE rank B.
• A. Treiber, A. Molina, C. Weinert, T. Schneider, K. Kersting. CryptoSPN: Privacy-preserving sum-product network inference. In 24. European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'20), 2020. CORE rank A.
• S. P. Bayerl, T. Frassetto, P. Jauernig, K. Riedhammer, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider, E. Stapf, C. Weinert. Offline model guard: Secure and private ML on mobile devices. In 23. Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE'20), 2020. CORE rank B.
• R. N. Reith, T. Schneider, O. Tkachenko. Efficiently stealing your machine learning models. In 18. Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES'19), 2019. Acceptance rate 20.9%.
• Á. Kiss, M. Naderpour, J. Liu, N. Asokan, T. Schneider. SoK: Modular and efficient private decision tree evaluation. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), 2019. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/PDTE. CORE rank A.
• M. S. Riazi, C. Weinert, O. Tkachenko, E. M. Songhori, T. Schneider, F. Koushanfar. Chameleon: A hybrid secure computation framework for machine learning applications. In 13. ACM Asia Conference on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'18), 2018. CORE rank A.
• M. Barni, P. Failla, R. Lazzeretti, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Privacy-preserving ECG classification with branching programs and neural networks. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2011. CORE rank A.
• M. Barni, P. Failla, V. Kolesnikov, R. Lazzeretti, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Secure evaluation of private linear branching programs with medical applications. In 14. European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'09), 2009. CORE rank A.
• A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Generalized universal circuits for secure evaluation of private functions with application to data classification. In 11. International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology (ICISC'08), 2008.

Private set intersection (PSI) allows two or multiple parties to jointly compute the intersection of their input sets without leaking any information about elements that are not in the intersection. PSI has many applications such as contact discovery in mobile messengers like Signal or Whatsapp, or measuring ad conversion rates as run by Google and merchants. We are mostly interested in improving the efficiency of PSI protocols for practical applications. Watch our explanatory video on YouTube.

Awards and Recognition

• 2022 Best Dissertation: Christian Weinert won the price of the Association of Friends of TU Darmstadt “for excellent scientific work for the best dissertation in the area of computer science 2022” for his dissertation “Practical Private Set Intersection Protocols for Privacy-Preserving Applications”.
• 2020 German IT-Security Award 2nd Prize: With “ContactGuard: Mobile Private Contact Discovery”, Christian Weinert, Thomas Schneider, and former ENCRYPTO master student Matthias Senker together with Daniel Kales and Christian Rechberger from TU Graz won the second prize in the 8. German IT-Security Award 2020 (60,000 EUR) among 46 submissions.
• 2019 Best Thesis: Matthias Senker won the price of the Association of Friends of TU Darmstadt “for the best thesis at the chair of Cryptography and Privacy Engineering (ENCRYPTO) 2018” for his master thesis “PSI Meets Signal: Integrating a Malicious-Secure Private Contact Discovery Solution in an Open-Source Instant Messaging Service”.
• 2016 Finalist of German IT-Security Award: With “Practical Private Set Intersection”, Michael Zohner and Thomas Schneider together with Benny Pinkas from Bar-Ilan University were among 9 finalists in the 6. German IT-Security Award 2016 among 45 submissions.
• 2015 CeBIT: Michael Zohner showcased our PSI research to Prof. Johanna Wanka, Germany’s federal minister for eduction and research, at the booth of the BMBF at CeBIT 2015.

Publications (selection)

• G. R. Chandran, T. Schneider, M. Stillger, and C. Weinert. Concretely Efficient Private Set Union via Circuit-Based PSI. In 20. ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'25), 2025. To appear. Online. CORE rank A.
• L. Hetz, T. Schneider, and C. Weinert. Scaling mobile private contact discovery to billions of users. In 28. European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'23), 2023. CORE rank A.
• A. Heinrich, M. Hollick, T. Schneider, M. Stute, C. Weinert. PrivateDrop: Practical privacy-preserving authentication for Apple AirDrop. In 30. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'21), 2021. Website: https://privatedrop.github.io/. CORE rank A*.
• D. Kales, C. Rechberger, T. Schneider, M. Senker, C. Weinert. Mobile private contact discovery at scale. In 28. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'19), 2019. Website: https://contact-discovery.github.io. CORE rank A*.
• B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, O. Tkachenko, A. Yanai. Efficient circuit-based PSI with linear communication. In 38. Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT'19, 2019. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/OPPRF-PSI. CORE rank A*.
• B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, C. Weinert, U. Wieder. Efficient circuit-based PSI via cuckoo hashing. In 37. Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT'18, 2018. CORE rank A*.
• B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. Scalable private set intersection based on OT extension. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS), 2018. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/JournalPSI. CORE rank A.
• Á. Kiss, J. Liu, T. Schneider, N. Asokan, B. Pinkas. Private set intersection for unequal set sizes with mobile applications. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), 2017. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/MobilePSI. CORE rank A.
• B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, G. Segev, M. Zohner. Phasing: Private set intersection using permutation-based hashing. In 24. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'15), 2015. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/PSI. CORE rank A*.
• B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. Faster private set intersection based on OT extension. In 23. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'14), 2014. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/PSI. CORE rank A*.
• M. Fischlin, B. Pinkas, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider, I. Visconti. Secure set intersection with untrusted hardware tokens. In 11. Cryptographers' Track at the RSA Conference (CT-RSA'11), 2011. CORE rank B.

Private function evaluation allows to securely evaluate a private function on private data while protecting both the function and the data. This has many applications such as user-specific insurance tarifs or private ML inference that also protects the ML models.

Awards and Recognition

• 2018 Heidelberg Laureate Forum: Ágnes Kiss was invited to the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2018 for her outstanding research on Private Function Evaluation.
• 2018 CAST IT Security Award: Daniel Günther with his work on “Valiant’s Universal Circuit – Towards a Modular Construction and Implementation” won the first prize among three finalists in the category “Best Bachelor Thesis” at the CAST IT Security Award 2018.

Publications (selection)

• D. Günther, J. Schmidt, T. Schneider, and H. Yalame. FLUENT: A Tool for Efficient Mixed-Protocol Semi-Private Function Evaluation. In 40. Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'24), 2024. CORE Rank A.
• Y. Disser, D. Günther, T. Schneider, M. Stillger, A. Wigandt, and H. Yalame. Breaking the size barrier: Universal circuits meet lookup tables. In 29. Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT'23, 2023, CORE rank A.
• M. Holz, Á. Kiss, D. Rathee, T.Schneider. Linear-complexity private function evaluation is practical. 25. European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), 2020. Core rank A.
• M. Y. Alhassan, D. Günther, Á. Kiss, T. Schneider. Efficient and scalable universal circuits. Journal of Cryptology (JoC), 2020. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/UC. CORE rank A*.
• Á. Kiss, M. Naderpour, J. Liu, N. Asokan, T. Schneider. SoK: Modular and efficient private decision tree evaluation. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), 2019. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/PDTE. CORE rank A.
• D. Günther, Á. Kiss, T. Schneider. More efficient universal circuit constructions. In 23. Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT'17, 2017. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/UC. CORE rank A.
• Á. Kiss, T. Schneider. Valiant's universal circuit is practical. In 35. Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT'16, 2016. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/UC. CORE rank A*.
• M. Barni, P. Failla, R. Lazzeretti, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Privacy-preserving ECG classification with branching programs and neural networks. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2011. CORE rank A.
• M. Barni, P. Failla, V. Kolesnikov, R. Lazzeretti, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Secure evaluation of private linear branching programs with medical applications. In 14. European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'09), 2009. CORE rank A.
• A. Paus, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Practical secure evaluation of semi-private functions. In 7. International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS'09), 2009. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/FairplaySPF. CORE rank B.
• A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Generalized universal circuits for secure evaluation of private functions with application to data classification. In 11. International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology (ICISC'08), 2008.
• V. Kolesnikov, T. Schneider. A practical universal circuit construction and secure evaluation of private functions. In 12. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC'08), 2008. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/FairplayPF. CORE rank A.

We have strong expertise in applying cryptographic protocols to improve privacy in real-world applications. This often involves exciting and very fruitful interdisciplinary research with other areas.

Awards and Recognition

• 2024 CROSSING Collaboration Award: Gowri R Chandran and Kasra Edalatnajad from the ENCRYPTO group together with Kilian Demuth and Sebastian Linsner won the CROSSING Collaboration Award 2024 for their joint work on Encrypted Multi-Channel Communication (EMC2).
• 2020 CAST/GI IT-Security PhD Thesis Award: Daniel Demmler won the CAST/GI PhD thesis award for IT-Security 2020 for his dissertation “Towards Practical Privacy-Preserving Protocols (opens in new tab)”.
• 2020 CAST IT Security Award: Daniel Günther with his work on “Optimizing Private Information Retrieval for Compromised Credential Checking” won the first prize among four finalists in the category “Best Master Thesis” at the CAST IT Security Award 2020.
• 2019 Best Dissertation: Daniel Demmler won the price of the Association of Friends of TU Darmstadt “for excellent scientific work for the best dissertation in the area of computer science 2018” for his dissertation “Towards Practical Privacy-Preserving Protocols (opens in new tab)”.

Publications (selection)

• A. Brüggemann, N. Koti, V. Kukkala, and T. Schneider. MultiCent: Secure and Scalable Computation of Centrality Measures on Multilayer Graphs (opens in new tab). 25th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), 2025. CORE rank A.
• D. Günther, M. Holz, B. Judkewitz, H. Möllering, B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, and A. Suresh. Privacy-Preserving Epidemiological Modeling on Mobile Graphs. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2025. CORE rank A.
• G. R Chandran, K. Demuth, K. Edalatnejad, S. Linsner, C. Reuter, and T. Schneider. Encrypted MultiChannel Communication (EMC2): Johnny should use Secret Sharing. In 23. Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES'24), 2024. Short paper.
• G. R Chandran, R. Nieminen, T. Schneider, and A. Suresh. PrivMail: A privacy-preserving framework for secure emails. In 28. European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'23), 2023. CORE rank A.
• K. Hamacher, T. Kussel, T. Schneider, O. Tkachenko. PEA: Practical private epistasis analysis using MPC (opens in new tab). In 27. European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'22), 2022. CORE rank A.
• A. Treiber, A. Nautsch, J. Kolberg, T. Schneider, C. Busch. Privacy-preserving PLDA speaker verification using outsourced secure computation. Speech Communication, 2019. CORE rank A.
• A. Nautsch, A. Jiménez, A. Treiber, J. Kolberg, C. Jasserand, E. Kindt, H. Delgado, M. Todisco, M. A. Hmani, A. Mtibaa, M. A. Abdelraheem, A. Abad, F. Teixeira, D. Matrouf, M. Gomez-Barrero, D. Petrovska-Delacrétaz, G. Chollet, N. Evans, T. Schneider, J.-F. Bonastre, B. Raj, I. Trancoso, C. Busch. Preserving privacy in speaker and speech characterisation. Computer Speech and Language (CSL), 2019. CORE rank A.
• A. Nautsch, J. Patino, A. Treiber, T. Stafylakis, P. Mizera, M. Todisco, T. Schneider, N. Evans. Privacy-preserving speaker recognition with cohort score normalisation. In 20. Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH'19), 2019. CORE rank A.
• K. Järvinen, H. Leppäkoski, E. S. Lohan, P. Richter, T. Schneider, O. Tkachenko, Z. Yang. PILOT: Practical privacy-preserving Indoor Localization using OuTsourcing. In 4. IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P'19), 2019.
• O. Tkachenko, C. Weinert, T. Schneider, K. Hamacher. Large-scale privacy-preserving statistical computations for distributed genome-wide association studies. In 13. ACM Asia Conference on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'18), 2018. CORE rank A.
• M. Chiesa, D. Demmler, M. Canini, M. Schapira, T. Schneider. SIXPACK: Securing Internet eXchange Points Against Curious onlooKers. In 13. International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT'17), 2017. CORE rank A.
• M. Albrecht, C. Rechberger, T. Schneider, T. Tiessen, M. Zohner. Ciphers for MPC and FHE. In 34. Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT'15, 2015. CORE rank A*.
• J. Bringer, H. Chabanne, M. Favre, A. Patey, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. GSHADE: Faster privacy-preserving distance computation and biometric identification (opens in new tab). In 2. ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSEC'14), 2014. CORE rank C.
• S. Bugiel, S. Nürnberger, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Twin Clouds: Secure cloud computing with low latency. In 12. Communications and Multimedia Security Conference (CMS'11), 2011. Best Paper Award. CORE rank C.
• Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Thomas Schneider, Immo Wehrenberg. Efficient privacy-preserving face recognition. In 12. International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology (ICISC'09), 2009.

We improve the efficiency and practicality of cryptographic protocols and in particular of secure computation protocols.

Awards and Recognition

2023 CAST IT-Security Award: Laura Hetz won the 1st prize at the CAST IT-Security Award for her master thesis “Communication-Efficient Privacy-Preserving Mobile Contact Discovery”.

Publications (selection)

• A. Brüggemann, O. Schick, T. Schneider, A. Suresh, and H. Yalame. Don't Eject the Impostor: Fast Three-Party Computation With a Known Cheater. In 45. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P'24), 2024. CORE rank A*.
• A. Brüggemann, R. Hundt, T. Schneider, A. Suresh, and H. Yalame. FLUTE: Fast and secure lookup table evaluations. In 44. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P'23), 2023. CORE rank A*.
• D. Günther, M. Heymann, B. Pinkas, T. Schneider. GPU-accelerated PIR with client-independent preprocessing for large-scale applications. In 31. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'22), 2022. CORE rank A*.
• A. Patra, T. Schneider, A. Suresh, H. Yalame. ABY2.0: Improved mixed-protocol secure two-party computation. In 30. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'21), 2021. CORE Rank A*.
• N. Büscher, D. Demmler, N. P. Karvelas, S. Katzenbeisser, J. Krämer, D. Rathee, T. Schneider, P. Struck. Secure two-party computation in a quantum world. In 18. International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS'20), 2020. CORE rank B.
• G. Asharov, Y. Lindell, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. More efficient oblivious transfer extensions. Journal of Cryptology (JoC), 2017. CORE rank A*.
• J. B. Nielsen, T. Schneider, R. Trifiletti. Constant round maliciously secure 2PC with function-independent preprocessing using LEGO. In 24. Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'17), 2017. CORE rank A*.
• G. Asharov, Y. Lindell, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. More efficient oblivious transfer extensions with security for malicious adversaries. In 34. Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT'15, 2015. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/OTExtension. CORE rank A*.
• G. Asharov, Y. Lindell, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. More efficient oblivious transfer and extensions for faster secure computation. In 20. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'13), 2013. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/OTExtension. CORE rank A*.
• B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, N. P. Smart, S. C. Williams. Secure two-party computation is practical. In 15. Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT'09, 2009. CORE rank A.
• V. Kolesnikov, T. Schneider. Improved garbled circuit: Free XOR gates and applications. In 35. International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP'08), 2008. CORE rank A.

Hardware-assisted cryptographic protocols allow to improve the efficiency and/or security of cryptographic protocols by using trusted hardware such as smartcards or trusted execution environments like Intel SGX or ARM TrustZone or hardware accelerators.

Publications (selection)

• L. Reichert, G. R Chandran, P. Schoppmann, T. Schneider, and B. Scheuermann. Menhir: An Oblivious Database with Protection against Access and Volume Pattern Leakage. In 19. ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'24), 2024. CORE rank A.
• J.-P. Münch, T. Schneider, H. Yalame. VASA: Vector AES instructions for Security Applications. In 37. Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'21), 2021. CORE rank A.
• S. P. Bayerl, T. Frassetto, P. Jauernig, K. Riedhammer, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider, E. Stapf, C. Weinert. Offline model guard: Secure and private ML on mobile devices. In 23. Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE'20), 2020. CORE rank B.
• S. Felsen, Á. Kiss, T. Schneider, C. Weinert. Secure and private function evaluation with Intel SGX. In 10. ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop (CCSW'19), 2019.
• F. Brasser, T. Frassetto, K. Riedhammer, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider, C. Weinert. VoiceGuard: Secure and private speech processing. In 19. Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH'18), 2018. CORE rank A.
• E. M. Songhori, S. Zeitouni, G. Dessouky, T. Schneider, A.-R. Sadeghi, F. Koushanfar. GarbledCPU: A MIPS processor for secure computation in hardware. In 53. Annual Design Automation Conference (DAC'16), 2016. CORE rank A.
• D. Demmler, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. Ad-hoc secure two-party computation on mobile devices using hardware tokens. In 23. USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'14), 2014. CORE rank A*.
• K. Järvinen, V. Kolesnikov, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Garbled circuits for leakage-resilience: Hardware implementation and evaluation of one-time programs. In 12. International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES'10), 2010. CORE rank A.
• K. Järvinen, V. Kolesnikov, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. Embedded SFE: Offloading server and network using hardware tokens. In 14. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC'10), 2010. CORE rank A.

We analyze and attack the privacy and security of real-world systems and research papers and propose fixes and alternatives.

Publications (selection)

• C. Hagen, C. Weinert, C. Sendner, A. Dmitrienko, and T. Schneider. Contact discovery in mobile messengers: Low-cost attacks, quantitative analyses, and efficient mitigations. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS) 2023. CORE rank A.
• R. Nieminen and T. Schneider. Breaking and fixing garbled circuits when a gate has duplicate input wires (opens in new tab). Journal of Cryptology (JoC), 2023. Part of Topical Collection on Computing on Encrypted Data. CORE rank A*.
• T. Schneider, A. Suresh, and H. Yalame. Comments on “Privacy-enhanced federated learning against poisoning adversaries” (opens in new tab). In IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2023. CORE rank A.
• S. Kamara, A. Kati, T. Moataz, T. Schneider, A. Treiber, M. Yonli. SoK: Cryptanalysis of encrypted search with LEAKER – a framework for LEakage AttacK Evaluation on Real-world data. In 7. IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P'22), 2022. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/LEAKER.
• C. Hagen, C. Weinert, C. Sendner, A. Dmitrienko, T. Schneider. All the numbers are US: Large-scale abuse of contact discovery in mobile messengers. In 28. Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'21), 2021. Website: https://contact-discovery.github.io. CORE rank A*.
• T. Schneider, A. Treiber. A comment on privacy-preserving scalar product protocols as proposed in “SPOC”. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 2020. Code: https://encrypto.de/code/SPOCattack. CORE rank A*.
• M. Schneider, T. Schneider. Notes on non-interactive secure comparison in “Image feature extraction in the encrypted domain with privacy-preserving SIFT". In 2. ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSEC'14), 2014. CORE rank C.
• S. Bugiel, S. Nürnberger, T. Pöppelmann, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider. AmazonIA: When elasticity snaps back. In 18. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'11), 2011. CORE rank A*.